Backstop [Class Warfare: Shielder]

LantisEscudoJune 22, 2025AMV, Iron Chef, Videos

After finishing my Assassin video for the Class Warfare event, I had about a day before the deadline, and I knew that there weren’t a lot of Shielder entries yet at that point. I’d considered a sports-themed video for my main idea, but couldn’t find any song that seemed to fit. Searching around on a whim after submitting the Assassin video, I stumbled across “Goalie Goalie” from the 2018 FIFA World Cup and thought I could throw together a garbage video very quickly, just for a laugh.

I think it may have taken longer to rip the BluRays of Pride of Orange than I spent actually editing the video, which was just every shot I could find of a goalie character in the first five episodes slapped together in a ten-second video.

It got a few laughs in the streams, which is all I can ask for out of such a zero-effort project.

Anime – Pride of Orange
Audio – Arash Nyusha Pitbull Blanco – Goalie Goalie
Completed May 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

The Grammaton Cleric [Class Warfare: Assassin]

LantisEscudoJune 22, 2025Iron Chef, LAMV, Videos

Speedy180’s Class Warfare event issued the challenge to editors to edit a video showcasing one a character or set of characters that exemplify one of the Fate/Stay Night hero classes (the original eight classes were available for this iteration of the event).

The timeframe for the event unfortunately coincided with the prep period for Anime Boston 2025, so I decided to put together a video in an Iron Chef style (about four hours of actual editing).

Equilibrium had come up in conversation in the same Discord server a few months before the event, so it was fresh in my mind when I went looking for an idea, and I knew that I wanted to use some sort of epic movie score style of audio track. I considered “O Fortuna” and “Duel of the Fates” before settling on “Liberi Fatali” as the audio track.

I debated whether to submit it as an Assassin video or a Berserker video, but ended up deciding to go with Assassin, partly because I knew that there were a lot more Berserker entries already.

It got several positive comments in the live streams of the event, and I think it’s pretty solid, especially as an Iron Chef project.

Video – Equilibrium
Audio – Nobuo Uematsu – Liberi Fatali (from Final Fantasy VIII)
Completed May 2025

YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2025 Contest Opening

LantisEscudoJune 22, 2025Contest Opening, Videos

In keeping with my plan from 2024, a large percentage of the 2025 opening was able to be reused from the previous version. I did head back into the city and shot some new locations to use and build up the library of options for future years, and paired the new shots with new or appropriate anime shots – special thanks to my friend that told me about the characters Wizard Barristers visiting Boston in episode 7, including the shot of Alewife station I was able to directly match.

Working on the opening with an existing framework this way significantly reduced my additional workload in the runup to the convention while still providing something fairly original, so I’m going to continue doing it for future years.

Video – Various Anime, Live action footage of Boston
Audio – Dropkick Murphys – Shipping Up to Boston
Completed May 2025

YouTube Link

Please Drink Responsibly

LantisEscudoJune 22, 2025AMV, Videos

I had originally planned on only submitting one video to RICE 2025, but about a month before the deadline, Thomas Benjamin Wild, Esq. released a new album, which included a song that immediately sparked an idea that I decided to give a shot. But while I was scrubbing footage for it, I realized that I wouldn’t have enough time to edit it.

As a silver lining, though, I’d been listening to the rest of his albums while scrubbing, and this idea had gotten added to my list, and would be significantly easier to put together, so I pivoted with about three weeks to go before the deadline. And then I came down with pneumonia that put me in bed for more than a week, which was an absolutely miserable experience that I recommend anyone to avoid.

I did manage to get it together just before the deadline, and it did get a good amount of positive reactions from the other editors in RICE.

For such a silly idea, it worked better than I expected, and I had fun making it (once I got over being so sick).

Video – VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral After Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream
Audio – Thomas Benjamin Wild, Esq. – Pants Drunk
Completed February 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

All In a Day’s Work

LantisEscudoJune 15, 2025LAMV, Videos

I made a trip to Japan in December 2024, and one of the places I made a point to visit was the Wakayama Electric Railway’s Kishigawa Line, and in particular Idakiso and Kishi Stations, where the famous stationmaster cats Niitama and Yontama were on duty.

In the gift shop, there were a pair of DVDs celebrating the first stationmaster cat, Tama, which I immediately picked up, thinking they’d be a fun source to use for a video.

My original thought was to use an instrumental version of “Sampo” from Totoro, since it had the striding quality that epitomizes how cats walk, but both versions of the song on the soundtrack had lyrics, so I went looking for other options. After trying a few other songs like the cat parts from “Peter and the Wolf,” I came back to the Totoro soundtrack to see if another track might work. Finding “Lets Go to the Hospital” was both satisfying and frustrating, since it was the instrumental version of “Sampo” I was looking for in the first place that I had overlooked because of the title.

In choosing footage, I decided to focus on just Tama, which made a large portion of the DVDs difficult to use, as I wanted to avoid using footage that included her two assistants, Miiko and Chibi.

The video got a good reaction in RICE 2025, and was nominated as a finalist in the Palate Cleanser category.

Video – Tama and the Tama Train; Super Station Master Tama: Riding the Strawberry Wind
Audio – Joe Hisaishi – Let’s Go to the Hospital
Completed January 2025

YouTube blocked the video due to the audio, but I can share it through Google Drive.

Community Spirit

LantisEscudoJune 15, 2025AMV, Iron Chef, Videos

I’d had this idea on my list for a while, since right after Frozen 2 was in theaters. I’d picked up the soundtrack and heard this cut song – my brain immediately suggested Poppy Hill as a pairing, and it marinated on my idea list for a few years.

After rushing to finish and submit Reflecting North to AWA 2025’s Accolades on Friday morning from my hotel room at Bakuretsu Con 2025, I spent most of the rest of the day at the con. I got back to my room around 8PM, several hours earlier than I had planned, and since I happened to have had the footage with me, I decided to see if I could Iron Chef it into a submittable form in the four hours before the deadline at midnight.

I did manage to get it complete in time, but there were a few compromises along the way. I ended up using a lot more solo walking shots than I intended, mainly to avoid having to spend any of my limited time removing lip flap.

Overall, a fun challenge to tackle and a decent result. I’m glad to have the idea out of my brain and to have used one of the more obscure Ghibli titles in making it.

Video – From Up On Poppy Hill
Audio – Kristen Bell – Home (from Frozen 2)
Completed October 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

Reflecting North

LantisEscudoJune 15, 2025AMV, Videos

Back in 2004, norskotaku released their video Illuminations I: Reflections of a Goddess, an almost-10-minute-long epic using the Ah! My Goddess movie and the “Reflections of Earth” segment from EPCOT’s Illuminations fireworks show, and I absolutely loved the video. They included in their video description that they planned to do a second video, also using the Ah! My Goddess movie paired with the “We Go On” section of Illuminations.

20 years later, that first video turned out to be the last one norskotaku would release (as of 2025, at least), but it had stuck with me to the point that I’d bought the audio CD for Illuminations and even made my so-far-only trip to EPCOT at Disney World to catch the fireworks show before it closed in 2019 (barely avoiding getting hit by Hurricane Dorian by only one day).

In the intervening two decades, Ah! My Goddess had also gotten two seasons of TV series and an OVA, so I decided that I wanted to both close the circle and pay tribute to the original video by making a video using the “We Go On” segment, but with the newer series instead of the movie.

Unfortunately, the period of time I had to edit it for AWA 2025’s Accolades competition directly overlapped with the preparation period for Bakuretsu Con 2025, where I was the coordinator for the AMV Contest – in fact, the AWA submission deadline was on the convention’s opening Friday. The later portions of the video ended up disappointingly rushed, and were actually edited in my hotel room at Bakuretsu Con Thursday night and Friday morning before I started my con day. I want to go back and revise those portions of the video someday, but I’ve changed primary editing programs in the meantime (from Adobe Premiere to Davinci Resolve), so converting the timeline will take some effort to set up.

While I’m disappointed in the result, I did enjoy making this one, and hopefully the revised-someday-version will be better.

Video – Ah! My Goddess TV
Audio – Kellie Coffey – We Go On (from EPCOT’s Illuminations)
Completed October 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Rule of Thirds (POE 2024 Round 2)

LantisEscudoJune 15, 2025AMV, Project Editor, Videos

I was incredibly busy during POE 2024, so I only managed to participate in one round, Round 2. That round had the theme of “Hobby Lobby,” where we were asked to create a video in a week that showcased characters enjoying a hobby.

I’d had “Life Through a Lens” on my ideas list for a while after it popped up in a Spotify Weekly list for me, and it felt like a perfect match for the theme, using characters that were photographers. I had debated several different video sources as options, as well as going massively multi-source, but I ended up deciding to limit it to three series, largely to make the title pun. The Rule of Thirds is a photography framing technique where you mentally divide the image into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, and then frame your photo so that the object of interest is near one of the four intersection points of the one-third lines.

Scrubbing through the footage for usable scenes took longer than I planned, since I’d only actually watched one of the three (my backlog is deep and only growing), but once I’d managed all of that, the video itself came together pretty quickly.

I never looked at the results of the round judging, so I don’t really know how well it was received, but a couple people did mention to me that they enjoyed it.

Video – Photo Kano, Tada Never Falls In Love, Waiting In the Summer
Audio – Jackson Harris – Life Through a Lens
Completed September 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

2024 Anime Boston AMV Contest Opening

LantisEscudoJune 11, 2025Contest Opening, Videos

Beginning with 2024, Anime Boston no longer had a designated theme, so I needed to come up with an idea for an opening without that prompt to start brainstorming from. The idea finally sprouted when I was talking to a friend of mine that goes to Otakon every year, and they complained about the contest opening always using the entire song of ELO’s “Twilight” because they felt it was too long.

I decided I wanted to create an opening that I could reuse large parts of the framework of year-to-year, using an iconic song related to Boston. Finding the song was a pretty easy choice, as “Shipping Up to Boston” is used almost everywhere, and it also is a rocking song that definitely gets crowds excited. I found a really good instrumental version that I could cleanly shorten down to about a minute to avoid overstaying its welcome.

My primary idea was to take scenes from anime and juxtapose them against shots of landmarks from around the city. I spent a couple days running around the city shooting my own footage, since it was a lot easier to get the shots I wanted that way instead of trying to use stock footage libraries.

There are a couple of local and con in-jokes in the video, such as the pairing of the Isabella Gardner Museum (the site of a famous unsolved art heist) and Lupin. The first two shots are nods to the con’s history, as Charlie’s Kitchen was the restaurant the con’s founders were in when they decided to start the con, and the Park Plaza was the con’s home for the first two years before it moved to the Hynes.

It got a good reaction at the showing, and I also started including it as the opener to the awards show, as it only adds a minute to the run time, but sets up the showing better than jumping straight into the awards.

Video – Various Anime, Original footage
Audio – Dropkick Murphys – Shipping Up to Boston (instrumental)
Completed March 2024

YouTube Link

The Hero We Need

LantisEscudoJune 11, 2025AMV, Videos

One of my other hobbies besides AMVs is collecting retro video games, which is how I first discovered the existence of Eight Man, which has an also-obscure game for the Neo Geo. The series was originally broadcast in 1963/64, and is the origin of Japan’s first cyborg superhero, predating Kamen Rider by about eight years. A few years ago, I saw a post on then-Twitter announcing that the series was getting a BluRay release in Japan, and on a whim, I decided to jump on it, and it sat in my collection waiting for an idea to strike.

Inspiration finally struck right after the deadline for RICE 2024, and just before the deadline for Sakuracon, when I stumbled across a copy of the Fleischer Superman shorts in a store and the Superman/Eight Man parallel jumped into my head. I listened to quite a few different Superman themes to figure out which one fit best, and settled on the Lois & Clark version, partially because I could use the original opening as a reference to make a shot-for-shot parody, since I wanted to send something new to Sakuracon and only had a few days to put it together.

I managed to find the matching fonts from the original L&C opening for the credits, and also put the accurate matching credits for Eight Man (though with character names instead of actor names). There were a few shots I had to stretch a bit to find a match to the original shots (especially for some of the Lois shots), but mostly managed to find something that was close enough to work.

This was fun to make, and I want to use the series again someday.

Video – Eight Man
Audio – Jay Gruska – Lois & Clark Main Theme
Completed February 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link